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Bob Chassells' text and sumti-raising



Bob Chassell wrote:
>.i mi cuska lu genai le zekri prenu goi ko'a ge kalri rinka le stela tanxe
>   I said       "If the    thief                  opened the lock box
>
>    gi porpi rinka ri
>    and did not break it,
                                                                         (1)
>    gi ko'a cu djano  lo nu kalri sazru le tanxe vorme
>    then he    knew the process of open operating the box door.

and later revised this to:

>Here is what I think is the correct solution using GEK and GIK:
>
>    ganai   le  zekri prenu goi ko'a
>    only-if the crime person    X1
>
>        ge   kalri rinka le stela tanxe gi  na'e       porpi  rinka ri
>        both open  cause the lock box   and other-than broken cause it
                                                                          (2)
>    gi   ko'a cu djano lo nu       kalri sazru   le  tanxe vorme
>    then he      knows the process open  operate the lock  box.

The correction is better.  There are some minor nits which I will not
bother with, and Nora identified about 4 problems in the text that would
be serious enough to interfere with understanding, but on the whole,
Nora and I agree with John Cowan's judgement that this was an excellent
sample text.

But I want to take a closer look at one part of the above, which Bob
corrected without comment in the second version, but for which both
versions fail.  The text conveniently serves as an example of why sumti
raising is needed in Lojban.

In (1), Bob had:

>    gi porpi rinka ri
>    and did not break it,

There is something obviously wrong here:  the English has a negation
that is not present in the Lojban.  In (2), Bob made this:

>    gi  na'e       porpi  rinka ri
>    and other-than broken cause it

This has the negation, but incorrectly.  With parentheses showing how
the text groups, this will be clear.  (People checking word lists will
note that "porpi" is not the correct word for the English, but we'll get
to that in a moment.)

>    gi  <na'e       porpi >  rinka ri
>    and <other-than broken>  cause it

Rather than saying that the thief did not break it, the text suggests
that he might actually have fixed it, or in some other way had a causal
effect on its being non-broken.  The translation of the first version
suggests this is not Bob's intent.

The correct way to add the negation is to use "na", though given the
heavy use of connectives in the sentence, which Bob says was
stylistically important, it would have been better still to incorporate
the negation in the connective:

    ginai   porpi  rinka ri                              (3)
    and-not broken cause it

    gi  na  porpi  rinka ri
    and not broken cause it

In both cases, the negation has scope over the entire clause:

    gi  na  <porpi  rinka ri>
    and not <broken cause it>

(By the way, I never commented on Bob's short summary of negation a
couple of weeks ago.  It seemed to be good insofar as it went, but did
not cover such tricky questions as the scope of negation.  It was just
such tricky questions, which were never completely answered for
Institute Loglan, that we wrote the negation paper in order to answer.)

Given this correction, let us look at what else is wrong.

In (1), he translated "porpi" as "break", which is correct.  It is the
intransitive "x1 breaks".  I think, given his modification in (2), that
he might have wanted "spofu" "x1 is broken".

In either case, however, the sentence fails for another reason.  The
role of 'it' makes no sense.  I am assuming, by back counting, that "ri"
refers to the lock.  The place structure of all tanru is that of the
final term, so what Bob has really said in (2) is:

>    gi  na'e       porpi      rinka  ri
     and other-than-breakingly causes the lock.

a) The thief did not cause the lock, breakingly, nonbreakingly, or
   otherwise.  What he presumably did was other-than-cause the lock to
   break.  This might be expressed in Lojban as:

     gi  na'e       rinka le nu     ri spofu/porpi               (4)
     and other-than cause the-event it is-broken/breaks

It would be very difficult to turn this into a proper tanru with the
place structure Bob sought.  The closest I can come uses the following
transformations:

     gi  na'e       rinka  co      se spofu/porpi ri
     and other-than causer of-type be-broken      of it

     gi  na'eke      se spofu/porpi be ri rinka
     and other-than: be-broken      of it causer

These are both sophisticated and very Lojbanic, and difficult for the
English speaker to grasp.  By comparison, neither Bob, John Cowan, or
Nora noticed a problem with "ri" in the effect place of rinka - they
knew what it meant, even though what he said was something else.

The expansion (4) shows why.  The effect place of rinka should be an
abstraction, and we natural language speakers supply the obvious one
when presented with "ri" and the tanru-supplied "porpi" (even though the
porpi has no grammatical control over the interpretation of that place).

What we all did was natural allow for sumti raising the "ri" from the
abstract clause.  With sumti raising, the clause in (2) makes perfect
sense, and in effect Bob has given us a new use for tanru - to specify
the predicate of the abstraction.  The result, though semantically
ambiguous, was perfectly clear to natural langauge speakers who naturally
sumti-raise.

I have argued against jimc that just such effects will occur.  It is
short and convenient to sumti-raise, and people LIKE
vague-but-natural-seeming tanru.  They do not and will not perform all
the sophisticated analysis that jimc's computer will in analyzing his
'diklujvo' - they will just express and understand, and damn the
computer.

The rules of a language have to be sufficiently natural that people
follow them almost habitually from the start.  If jimc imposes all kinds
of formal 'diklujvo' rules, and people break them and still understand
each other, he will never convince them that they are wrong and he and
his computer are right to misinterpret what they find easily
understandable.  They will simply say:  fix the compiuter program so it
understands our human language - we shouldn't have to change our
language for the sake of his computer.

My sumti-rasing proposal, though intended originally to solve another
problem, solves the problem of Bob's (2) without forcing him to say
(4).  It requires him only to be cognizant that he might any time he
expresses a sumti. actually be sumti-raising.  If the place structure
would normally require an abstract, just say what comes naturally, but
mark the sumti as raised from an unspecified abstraction.

I contend it is easier to get people to learn to put in "tu'a" then to
be sufficiently self-analytical as to what they 'really mean' to devise
(4).

Instead, finally putting all the corrections and sumti raising together,
you get either:

from (3)
        ginai   porpi      rinka  tu'a ri
        and-not breakingly causes it-to-be
or from (4)
        gi  na'eke      porpi      rinka  tu'a ri
        and other-than: breakingly-causes it-to-be
   or
        gi  porpi      na'e       rinka  tu'a ri
        and breakingly-other-than-causes it-to-be

Of course, I would still try to teach them to use (4) - I, like jimc,
believe that specific abstraction bridi are not particularly difficult
to learn to do, and the extra syllables are not many.  But I want the
fall back, in case I am worng, or just in case the Lojbani want to do
things stylistically different than I want to, of them being able to
express themselves natural-language-ly, making only the minimal
concession of tu'a to preserve the explicit indication of the logical
structure.

lojbab